During the wars of Cavaliers and Roundheads Oxford suffered some shrewd blows. It was for the King always, and after the Restoration the Court recognised its loyalty. Charles II. with his Queen—and eke another lady or so as a rule—was often a visitor, and spent a great part of the Plague Year there, though "the Merry Monarch" showed no want of pluck or loyalty to his sore-stricken people during that time, and did not abandon London altogether. But all who could got out of London for a while to escape the horrors of which Pepys has given so clear a record in his diary and letters, as in the following to Lady Carteret:—
ST. MAGDALEN, TOWER AND COLLEGE, OXFORD
The absence of the Court and emptiness of the city takes away all occasion of news, save only such melancholy stories as would rather sadden than find your Ladyship any divertisement in the hearing; I have stayed in the city till above 7400 died in one week, and of them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber-street, and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other, and not 50 upon the Exchange; till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been swept away; till my very physician, Dr. Burnet, who undertook to secure me against any infection, having survived the month of his own house being shut up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow daylight for that service: lastly, till I could find neither meat nor drink safe, the butcheries being everywhere visited, my brewer's house shut up, and my baker, with his whole family, dead of the plague.
Greenwich begins apace to be sickly; but we are, by the command of the King, taking all the care we can to prevent its growth; and meeting to that purpose yesterday, after sermon, with the town officers, many doleful informations were brought us, and, among others, this, which I shall trouble your Ladyship with the telling:—Complaint was brought us against one in the town for receiving into his house a child newly brought from an infected house in London. Upon inquiry, we found that it was the child of a very able citizen in Gracious Street, who, having lost already all the rest of his children, and himself and wife being shut up and in despair of escaping, implored only the liberty of using the means for the saving of this only babe, which with difficulty was allowed, and they suffered to deliver it, stripped naked out at a window into the arms of a friend, who, shifting into fresh clothes, conveyed it thus to Greenwich, where, upon this information from Alderman Hooker, we suffer it to remain. This I tell your Ladyship as one instance of the miserable straits our poor neighbours are reduced to.
Pepys himself had taken refuge then at Greenwich. All had left who could, even to dour old John Milton, whose plague retreat at Chalfont St. Giles (Bucks) is now preserved as an historical relic, and usually holds the attention of the rushing tourist, who is "doing" England within a month, for quite seven minutes. That is really space for a matured consideration to the tourist mind.
"The motor has slowed down from seventy miles an hour to fifty miles an hour. We are passing a point of great historic interest." That is sight-seeing in Europe for the American tourist according to one of their own humorists. I have had many opportunities to observe the truth on which that sarcasm is based. Take Milton's Cottage for an instance. I had walked there from Chorley Wood one spring afternoon, and was enjoying idly the blooms in the little garden, when a motor rushed up, disgorged a party of hurried tourists, of which the man member had a guide-book. "Is this Milton's Cottage?" It was: so they entered. "Is this really Milton's chair? Sure?" It was. So they all sat on it solemnly in turn. Within five minutes their chariot of petrol had wrapped them up again, and they were rushing over the face of England to see some shrine of the Pilgrim Fathers.
